TRUMP SUPPORTER WHO DISCUSSED SURVEILLANCE OF AMBASSADOR MARIE YOVANOVITCH HAS HISTORY OF STALKING, MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES


Lee Fang
January 15 2020

THE MAN who relayed information about Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s location to Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian associates was a known stalker with mental health issues.

Newly released private WhatsApp messages between Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani’s, and Robert F. Hyde, a donor to President Donald Trump’s campaign and aspiring GOP lawmaker, reveal what appears to be an effort to surveil the former ambassador to Ukraine, whose ouster was sought by Giuliani as part of a plan to pressure the Ukrainian government into pursuing political investigations at the White House’s behest.

The messages, released Tuesday by the House Intelligence Committee relating to its ongoing impeachment inquiry, show Hyde claiming to know Yovanovitch’s location and movements in Kyiv, while implying that he was in contact with local security services in Ukraine who could be paid to go after the ambassador.
The startling messages show the extent to which the Giuliani associates were willing to at least entertain extreme tactics from a campaign donor who has courted controversy and even unsettled others, including fellow supporters of the president.

The Intercept obtained police records showing that Hyde violated a restraining order issued by a Washington, D.C., Superior Court judge at the request of a Republican consultant who says that Hyde stalked her and intimidated her family over the last year. In one of the reports, an officer disclosed that Connecticut police confiscated Hyde’s firearms in connection to his violation of the restraining order. Hyde was reported to authorities for “unsettling behavior” and trespassing at a church in Connecticut, according to a separate police report last summer.

Asked for comment, Hyde texted The Intercept, “Bull Schiff is still crying?! Lol. Tell him to go whistleblow himself.” He did not respond to other allegations against him.

Hyde’s other acquaintances noted that he has a history of erratic behavior. Jeffrey Peterson, a technology entrepreneur, said Hyde came to meet with him recently, then disappeared, only to resurface months later. Hyde, Peterson said, “has been trying to reestablish contact with me ever since, not really comfortable with him.”

Hyde publicized that he was placed in a psychiatric facility in Florida last May, following an incident at the Trump National Doral Miami resort. A report written by the Doral Police Department at the time notes that Hyde expressed fear for his life and told officers that he “was scared due to several painting workers and landscape working trying to do harm to him because they weren’t working.”

Hyde posted about his facility stay in a now-deleted Instagram video. “I don’t know what that nine days was in that facility, and they wanted to keep me 10 and I finally got out, but here I am,” Hyde said in the video following his release. The caption for the video and the police report reference confinement under Florida’s Baker Act, which allows individuals showing signs of mental illness who could pose a danger to themselves or others to be involuntarily submitted to a mental health facility.

Shortly after his release, in a now-deleted Facebook post, Hyde wondered if Dan Coats, Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence, “effed with me in DC a month ago” and “probably initiated my disappearance for awhile.”

Last year, Hyde began a campaign for Congress, seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Conn. The former owner of a landscaping company, Hyde describes himself as a “U.S. Marine Corps Iraqi Freedom war veteran” and “an ardent support of our duly elected president, President Trump” on his campaign website.

Hyde has other legal issues, according to records, including an eviction from a commercial property in Simsbury, Connecticut, where his former business was located. In 2011, Hyde was arrested in Avon, Connecticut, for reckless endangerment in connection a tree that fell on power lines near one of his work sites. He also owes more than $2,000 in child support payments, according to the Hartford Courant, despite donating thousands of dollars to Trump and the Republican National Committee.

Hyde’s tone toward women has also sparked a minor scandal in his political campaign. In December, after Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., suspended her presidential bid, Hyde tweeted that Harris was “brought to her knees,” followed by the message: “Must be a hard one to swallow. #KamalaHarris #heelsup.” The inflammatory message was swiftly condemned by both parties. The Connecticut Republican Party returned Hyde’s donation of $750 in response to his “vile comments on Twitter.”

In the newly released WhatsApp messages, Hyde wrote to Parnas, “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch,” in reference to Yovanovitch.

Throughout 2018 and much of early 2019, Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman, worked closely with Giuliani to oust Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who was viewed as an obstacle to a plot to use the Ukrainian government to investigate Trump’s political adversaries, including former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and the Democratic National Committee.

As part of the effort, Parnas and Fruman committed to raising $20,000 for then-Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, in exchange for a letter from Sessions to the State Department demanding Yovanovitch’s ouster.

The WhatsApp messages between Hyde and Parnas reveal a new dimension to the continued focus of Giuliani’s focus on Yovanovitch. “She under heavy protection outside Kiev,” Hyde wrote to Parnas last March. In another batch of messages, Hyde claimed, “That address I sent you checks out. It’s next to the embassy.” Other Hyde messages conveyed an eerie level of knowledge about Yovanovitch’s activities: “She’s talked to three people. Her phone is off. Computer is off. She’s next to the embassy. Not in the embassy. Private security. Been there since Thursday.”

Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, did not immediately respond to request from The Intercept. In a statement to the Washington Post, he said, “There is no evidence that Mr. Parnas participated, agreed, paid money or took any other steps in furtherance of Mr. Hyde’s proposals.”

Hyde also sent several cryptic messages that implied he knew of “security forces” in Ukraine who could be tapped for assistance. “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price. Guess you can do anything in Ukraine with money …” Parnas responded, “Lol.”

Whether Hyde truly had special access to Yovanovitch remains unclear. The WhatsApp messages were sent last March as the Giuliani-backed campaign to force Ukraine to investigate the Bidens escalated. In April, Trump ordered Yovanovitch to be recalled to Washington, and she was terminated from her post in early May. In November, during the impeachment hearing, Yovanovitch testified that she had been advised by the State Department that she faced threats to her security last year.

Hyde’s various social media profiles are filled with pictures of him with the president, Eric Trump, Corey Lewandowski, Roger Stone, Sarah Sanders, and a variety of Republican lawmakers. On multiple occasions, his photo has been snapped at federal government offices and at Trump-owned properties in New Jersey, Florida, and Washington, D.C. As CNN reported, Hyde “posed for a selfie with Trump on Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019, the same day Trump first called Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

Last year, Hyde texted photos to Emilie Munson, a Connecticut-based journalist, including images of himself smoking cigars with Giuliani, Fruman, and Parnas.

I stand with @realDonaldTrump! pic.twitter.com/lKLTYZAfIy— HYDE for U.S. Congress (@rfhyde1) January 3, 2020

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Climate change: Citizens' assembly prepares to tackle climate change

By Roger HarrabinBBC environment analyst

• 17 January 2020
 

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Image copyrightAFP

Should aviation be taxed more? Should SUVs be banned? Should wind power be subsidised by taxpayers?

These are the sort of the climate-related questions to be pondered by a new "citizens' assembly", composed of 110 members of the public.

The panel has been selected to reflect key sectors of society and a range of opinion.

They will spend four weekends listening to evidence from experts on how climate policy and science will affect the UK.

Then they’ll offer their opinions on the best ways for Britain to achieve its demanding law that mandates "net zero" carbon emissions by 2050.

Net zero describes achieving an overall balance between the emissions produced and emissions removed from the atmosphere.

• A really simple guide to climate change

What's the reasoning behind it?

The idea for this unprecedented assembly was conceived by MPs on six parliamentary select committees who want to learn more about the public's opinions on climate change.

It will solely offer advice for the UK to meet its own Climate Change Act.

It will not debate the scientific consensus that climate change is dangerous.

Nor will it debate if the net zero target should be brought forward to 2030, as the Extinction Rebellion group has called for.

What will the jury members do?

Some 30,000 invitations to take part were sent out under a process designed to represent all parts of the UK and differences in race, gender, age and views on climate change. People from both rural and urban areas were selected.

Thousands agreed to take part, then these were whittled down to 110.

The gathering will include views of all hues – from people who don’t fear climate change to those who definitely do.

Image copyrightREUTERS

Image captionThe process will sound out how willing people are to change their lifestyles, including how they get around (SUV pictured)

Most of the presentations they experience will come from academics, although think-tanks, NGOs, and industry voices will also be heard.

On food, for instance, the assembly will hear opposing views from the National Farmers Union and from the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, which argues for the need to change the way we farm.

The project’s being organised by a charity, Involve. It pledges to “uphold key principles of balance, accuracy and comprehensiveness”.

What will be the outcome?

The assembly’s website says the members of its advisory panel were chosen to represent a broad range of views across different sectors. All the expert advisers are acting voluntarily.

Sarah Allan from Involve told BBC News: "The aim is to give people a say on how the UK tackles climate change, and to give parliament and the government an understanding of what people think and where priorities lie.

“The focus is on how the UK achieves net zero. We will get people to look at trade-offs. They can’t say: 'we want net zero' then vote for doing nothing about it.'

She continued: “The Irish assembly was an incredibly useful tool for decision-makers – we are very optimistic that the UK climate change assembly will be useful too.”

One of the project’s leaders is Lorraine Whitmarsh, professor of environmental psychology at Cardiff University.

“It’s very exciting - we haven’t done anything on this level before,” she told BBC News. “It’s huge, and the recruitment (of members) has to be gold standard."

Will climate sceptics be involved?

Ms Whitmarsh explained: “There will be sceptics who don’t even believe climate change is caused by humans. But even they may want to consider evidence that some climate polices (such as active transport) will have health benefits attached.

“There will be other people who are very worried about climate change – but they may turn out to be unwilling to take on some of the financial consequences involved.

“It’s going to be really interesting.”

The announcement by the six select committees to hold a citizens assembly on climate change was in direct response to government policy on net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and was announced on 20 June 2019.

The net zero policy became law on 27 June 2019, making the UK the first major economy in the world to legislate for net zero. The 2019 Conservative party manifesto re-affirmed the government’s commitment to this target.

AMERICAN'S ARE RELIGIOUS NUTZ
JUST DON'T CALL THEM CHRISTIANS

Religious woman drove into oncoming traffic to ‘test her faith’

'Reilly also stated she did not care if the other people were injured because God would have taken care of them,' said police

Kate Ng

Route 93, where the incident occurred

A woman allegedly drove her car into oncoming traffic, hitting a car with three passengers in a bid to “test her faith”, said Pennsylvania State Police.

Nadejda Reilly, 51, was arrested on 7 January after she was involved in a head-on collision with a car on a major north-south highway in the US.

Ms Reilly had been reportedly driving for several hours waiting for a “calling from God” when she saw a car driving on the opposite side.

According to the affidavit from Pennsylvania police, she allegedly “wanted to test her faith by driving through the vehicle” and deliberately drove her car into the opposing lane of traffic.

Ms Reilly and two of the other car’s passengers were injured and taken to Lehigh Hospital-Hazleton. A third passenger was unharmed, said Trooper David Peters.

The two victims were an adult, who has been treated and released from hospital, and a 14-year-old girl whose condition is not immediately known, reported CNN.

Trooper Bruce Balliet said in the affidavit: “Reilly related God took care of her by not letting her [get] injured. Reilly expressed no concern or remorse for the victims. Reilly also stated she did not care if the other people were injured because God would have taken care of them.”

Court documents said Ms Reilly was charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, reckless endangerment and harassment, as well as traffic charges in relation to the crash.

Mr Reilly was originally granted bail at US$50,000 but the judge revoked it last Wednesday after he determined she was a threat to herself and the community, said court documents.

Her lawyer, Andrew Theyken Bench, filed a notice with the court that his client planned to waive her formal reading of criminal charges but declined to comment further on the record, reported Associated Press.

New solar power source and storage developed

By Claire HealdBBC News  

Image copyrightSOLIVUS

Image captionA solar arc at the University of Surrey where researchers will assess public reaction

A new form of combined solar power generation and storage is being developed for the UK.

It couples thin, flexible, lighter solar sheets with energy storage to power buildings or charge vehicles off-grid.

The company behind it, Solivus, plans to cover the roofs of large industrial buildings with the solar fabric.

These include supermarket warehouses and delivery company distribution centres.

But Solivus also plans to manufacture solar units or "arcs" for home use.

The aim is to create local, renewable energy, to give people and business their own power supply and help the UK towards its target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

• Organic solar cells set 'remarkable' energy record

The solar material is a carbon-based sheet, which the company describes as an "organic photovoltaic" (OPV). It's a material that absorbs sunlight and produces energy.

The layered film can be bent into shapes or glued on to flat or curved, vertical or horizontal, surfaces - where panels could not be used or fixed on without damaging the integrity of a building.

The firm says the film is one-tenth of the weight of traditional panels in frames - 1.8kg per m2 - contains no rare earth or toxic materials, and lasts for 20 years.

It puts its efficiency in a lab at about 13% but says that stays stable as temperatures rise in natural sunlight - a problem with traditional solar panels, although they can function at an average of 15-18% efficiency.

The film collects a wider spectrum of light than other panels, manufacturer Heliatek says, while still working on grey days.

Image captionJo Parker-Swift drew inspiration from laurel leaves for the panels

The plan is that the energy produced will be stored locally, in an electric vehicle battery, or potentially a flywheel battery, which can quickly release its charge.

• The five major challenges facing electric vehicles

The combination is the brainchild of Jo Parker-Swift, who has a background in biological sciences and has grown and sold two businesses that worked with NHS trusts.

But it was a chance meeting on a train with two former energy company bosses and a chat about growing demand that got her thinking about a way to harness enough solar power to take her house and car off-grid.

Once home, she looked at the leaves on laurel bushes in her garden, calculating the surface area.

"I must have looked like a right nutter," she says, marking all the leaves so she didn't count them twice.

But she felt nature might have the answer to energy independence - a large surface area in a small space, to capture sunlight. Something along the lines of a solar tree.

Image captionJo's original notes trying to find a green energy solution

So began a two-and-a-half year research and investment journey and a development of the idea that it would not just be one house running off-grid, but business, delivery companies and their vehicles, homes, stadiums, and energy points to charge electric transport.

• How could graphene transform the future?

Transport accounts for 23% of the UK's CO2 emissions, and the government has committed to ending the sale of new petrol or diesel vehicles by 2040.

She hopes the film will help in the battle to stop rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the damage to increasingly acidic oceans.

Businesses keen to be carbon neutral have reacted positively and Solivus's medium-term plan is to roll out an installation of film on large UK commercial properties and stadiums in 2021/22.

Their expectation is a 10,000m2 roof will provide approximately 1mw of energy - about enough to power a block of flats.

The company is also working with the University of Manchester's Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre to see if graphene can play a role.

Graphene is a strong 2D material just one atom thick, which efficiently conducts heat and electricity.

Image copyrightJO PARKER SWIFT

Image captionJo and Ben Ingham installing solar on the farm

The next step is more modest - the solar fabric has been installed on a farm building, let to a mobility scooter company that has to charge batteries for its fleet.

And the film has been shaped into "arcs" - units with curved sides and a large surface area, designed to absorb more light without needing to track the sun.

It is anticipated one unit would be a 1kw (kilowatt) system providing 1,000 kwhs (killowatt/hours) each year in the UK. University of Surrey researchers are looking at public reaction to the idea and the design.

The cost to consumers would come in repayment, not an initial investment, with the aim to come in below current energy bills.

Professor Michael Walls, of the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology at Loughborough University, says the concept of lightweight PV on buildings is "exciting" because it opens up new applications for solar. But there are economic and practical hurdles.

The current flexible PV market is a fraction of that for traditional rigid solar panels, meaning manufacturers of flexible PV do not have the same economies of scale.

So far, he says, some flexible solar films have seen problems where water has seeped through the coating, eventually causing degradation. And the dominant technology in flexible PVs has been CIGS - devices made of copper indium gallium diselenide.

"If they can sell at a reasonable cost and avoid technical issues, it would be fantastic, but there are many challenges," he says.

The idea of a solar tree may not yet be realised, but the journey is in progress.

What if the Universe has no end?
I THOUGHT IT WAS INFINITE 
I STILL WONDER WHAT IS IT THAT THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING INTO

SPACE


The Big Bang is widely accepted as being the beginning of everything we see around us, but other theories that are gathering support among scientists are suggesting otherwise.



By Patchen Barss 19th January 2020

The usual story of the Universe has a beginning, middle, and an end.

It began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe was tiny, hot, and dense. In less than a billionth of a billionth of a second, that pinpoint of a universe expanded to more than a billion, billion times its original size through a process called “cosmological inflation”.

Next came “the graceful exit”, when inflation stopped. The universe carried on expanding and cooling, but at a fraction of the initial rate. For the next 380,000 years, the Universe was so dense that not even light could move through it – the cosmos was an opaque, superhot plasma of scattered particles. When things finally cooled enough for the first hydrogen atoms to form, the Universe swiftly became transparent. Radiation burst out in every direction, and the Universe was on its way to becoming the lumpy entity we see today, with vast swaths of empty space punctuated by clumps of particles, dust, stars, black holes, galaxies, radiation, and other forms of matter and energy.

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Eventually these lumps of matter will drift so far apart that they will slowly disappear, according to some models. The Universe will become a cold, uniform soup of isolated photons.


The Universe we can currently see is made up of clumps of particles, dust, stars, black holes, galaxies, radiation (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI)

It’s not a particularly dramatic ending, although it does have a satisfying finality.

But what if the Big Bang wasn’t actually the start of it all?

Perhaps the Big Bang was more of a “Big Bounce”, a turning point in an ongoing cycle of contraction and expansion. Or, it could be more like a point of reflection, with a mirror image of our universe expanding out the “other side”, where antimatter replaces matter, and time itself flows backwards. (There might even be a “mirror you” pondering what life looks like on this side.)


Perhaps the Big Bang was more of a “Big Bounce”, a turning point in an ongoing cycle of contraction and expansion

Or, the Big Bang might be a transition point in a universe that has always been – and always will be – expanding. All of these theories sit outside mainstream cosmology, but all are supported by influential scientists.

The growing number of these competing theories suggests that it might now be time to let go of the idea that the Big Bang marked the beginning of space and time. And, indeed, that it may even have an end.

Many competing Big Bang alternative stem from deep dissatisfaction with the idea of cosmological inflation.

Scars left by the Big Bang in a weak microwave radiation that permeates the entire cosmos provides clues about what the early Universe looked like (Credit: Nasa)

“I have to confess, I never liked inflation from the beginning,” says Neil Turok, the former director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

“The inflationary paradigm has failed,” adds Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein professor in science at Princeton University, and proponent of a “Big Bounce” model.

“I always regarded inflation as a very artificial theory,” says Roger Penrose, emeritus Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford University. “The main reason that it didn't die at birth is that it was the only thing people could think of to explain what they call the ‘scale invariance of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations’.”

The Cosmic Microwave Background (or “CMB”) has been a fundamental factor in every model of the Universe since it was first observed in 1965. It’s a faint, ambient radiation found everywhere in the observable Universe that dates back to that moment when the Universe first became transparent to radiation.

The CMB is a major source of information about what the early Universe looked like. It is also a tantalising mystery for physicists. In every direction scientists point a radio telescope, the CMB looks the same, even in regions that seemingly could never have interacted with one another at any point in the history of a 13.8 billion-year- old universe.

Our observable universe expanded from one tiny homogenous region within that primordial hot mess

“The CMB temperature is the same on opposite sides of the sky and those parts of the sky would never have been in causal contact,” says Katie Mack, a cosmologist at North Carolina State University. “Something had to connect those two regions of the Universe in the past. Something had to tell that part of the sky to be the same temperature as that part of the sky.”

Without some mechanism to even out the temperature across the observable Universe, scientists would expect to see much larger variations in different regions.

Inflation offers a way to solve this so-called “homogeneity problem”. With a period of insane expansion stretching out the Universe so rapidly that almost the entire thing ended up far beyond the region we can observe and interact with. Our observableuniverse expanded from one tiny homogenous region within that primordial hot mess, producing the uniform CMB. Other regions beyond what we can observe might look very different.

Theoretical physicists are increasingly finding that inflation theory fails to account for the spread of matter and energy observed in the Universe (Credit: Nasa/ESA)

“Inflation seems to be the thing that has enough support from the data that we can take it as the default,” says Mack. ”It's the one I teach in my classes. But I always say that we don't know for sure that this happened. But it seems to fit the data pretty well, and is what most people would say is most likely.”

But there have always been shortcomings with the theory. Notably, there is no definitive mechanism to trigger inflationary expansion, or a testable explanation for how the graceful ending could happen. One idea put forward by proponents of inflation is that theoretical particles made up something called an “inflation field” that drove inflation and then decayed into the particles we see around us today.

But even with tweaks like this, inflation makes predictions that have, at least thus far, not been confirmed. The theory says spacetime should be warped by primordial gravitational waves that ricocheted out across the Universe with the Big Bang. But while certain types of gravitational waves have been detected, none of these primordial ones have yet been found to support the theory.

Quantum physics also forces inflation theories into very messy territory. Rare quantum fluctuations are predicted to cause inflation to break space up into an infinite number of patches with wildly different properties – a “multiverse” in which literally every imaginable outcome occurs.

“The theory is completely indecisive,” says Steinhardt. “It can only say that the observable Universe might be like this or that or any other possibility you can imagine, depending on where we happen to be in the multiverse. Nothing is ruled out that is physically conceivable.”

Steinhardt, who was one of the original architects of inflationary theory, ultimately got fed up with the lack of predictiveness and untestability.

“Do we really need to imagine that there exist an infinite number of messy universes that we have never seen and never will see in order to explain the one simple and remarkably smooth Universe we actually observe?” he asks. “I say no. We have to look for a better idea.”

Rather than being a beginning, the Big Bang could have been a moment of transition from one period of space and time to another – more of a bounce (Credit: Alamy)

The problem might have to do with the Big Bang itself, and with the idea that there was a beginning to space and time.

The “Big Bounce” theory agrees with the Big Bang picture of a hot, dense universe 13.8 billion years ago that began to expand and cool. But rather than being the beginning of space and time, that was a moment of transition from an earlier phase during which space was contracting.

With a bounce rather than a bang, Steinhardt says, distant parts of the cosmos would have plenty of time to interact with each other, and to form a single smooth universe in which the sources of CMB radiation would have had a chance to even out.

In fact, it’s possible that time has existed forever.

“And if a bounce happened in our past, why could there not have been many of them?” says Steinhardt. “In that case, it is plausible that there is one in our future. Our expanding universe could start to contract, returning to that dense state and starting the bounce cycle again.”

Steinhardt and Turok worked together on some early versions of the Big Bounce model, in which the Universe shrunk to such a tiny size that quantum physics took over from classical physics, leaving the predictions uncertain. But more recently, another of Steinhardt’s collaborators, Anna Ijjas, developed a model in which the Universe never gets so small that quantum physics dominates.

“It’s a rather prosaic, conservative idea described at all times by classical equations,” Steinhardt says. “Inflation says there’s a multiverse, that there’s an infinite number of ways the Universe might come out, and we just happen to live in the one that is smooth and flat. That’s possible but not likely. This Big Bounce model says this is how the Universe must be.”

Neil Turok has also been exploring another avenue for a simpler alternative to inflationary theory, the “Mirror Universe”. It predicts that another universe dominated by antimatter, but governed by the same physical laws as our own, is expanding outwards on the other side of the Big Bang – a kind of “anti-universe”, if you like.

“I take one thing away from the observations of the last 30 years, which is that the Universe is unbelievably simple,” he says. “At large scales, it is not chaotic. It is not random. It's incredibly ordered and regular and requires very few numbers to describe everything.”

Our forward-time flowing universe could have a perfect reflection that also extends out in reverse from the event we call the Big Bang (Credit: Alamy)

With this in mind, Turok sees no place for a multiverse, higher dimensions, or new particles to explain what can be seen when we look up at the heavens. The Mirror Universe offers all that – and might also solve one of the Universe’s big mysteries.

If you add up all the known mass in a galaxy – stars, nebulae, black holes and so on – the total doesn’t create enough gravity to explain the motion within and between galaxies. The remainder seems to be made up of something we cannot currently see – dark matter. This mysterious stuff accounts for about 85% of the matter in the universe.

The Mirror Universe model predicts that the Big Bang produced a particle known as “right-handed neutrinos” in abundance. While particle physicists have yet to directly see any of these particles, they are pretty sure they exist. And it is these that make up dark matter, according to those who support the Mirror Universe theory.

“It’s the only particle on that list (of particles in the Standard Model) that has the two requisite properties that we haven't directly observed it yet, and it could be stable,” says Latham Boyle, another leading proponent of the Mirror Universe theory and a colleague of Turok at the Perimeter Institute.

The entire picture of what we know nowadays, the whole history of the Universe, is what I call one ‘aeon’ in a succession of aeons – Roger Penrose

Perhaps the most challenging alternative to the Big Bang and inflation is Roger Penrose’s “Conformal Cyclic Cosmology” theory (CCC). Like the Big Bounce, it involves a universe that might have existed forever. But in CCC, it never goes through a period of contraction – it only ever expands.

“The view I have is that the Big Bang was not the beginning,” says Penrose. “The entire picture of what we know nowadays, the whole history of the Universe, is what I call one ‘aeon’ in a succession of aeons.”

Penrose’s model predicts that much of the matter in the Universe will eventually be dragged into ultra-massive black holes. As the Universe expands and cools to near absolute zero, those black holes will “boil away” through a phenomenon called Hawking Radiation.

“You have to think in terms of something like a googol years, which means a number one with 100 zeros,” says Penrose. “That’s the number of years or more for the really big ones to finally evaporate away. And then you’ve got a universe really dominated by photons (particles of light).”

Penrose says at this point, the Universe begins to look much as it did at its start, setting the stage for the start of another aeon.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology predicts that much of the Universe will be pulled into enormous black holes that will then boil away (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

One of the predictions of CCC is that there might be a record of the previous aeon in the cosmic microwave background radiation that originally inspired the inflation model. When hyper-massive black holes collide, the impact creates a huge release of energy in the form of gravitational waves. When giant black holes finally evaporate, they release a huge amount of energy in the form of low-frequency photons. Both of these phenomena are so powerful, Penrose says, that they can “burst through to the other side” of a transition from one aeon to the next, each leaving its own kind of “signal” embedded in the CMB like an echo from the past.

Penrose calls the patterns left behind by evaporating black holes “Hawking Points”.

For the first 380,000 years of the current aeon, these would have been nothing more than tiny points in the cosmos, but as the Universe has expanded, they would appear as “splotches” across the sky.

Penrose has been working with Polish, Korean and Armenian cosmologists to see if these patterns can actually be found by comparing measurements of the CMB with thousands of random patterns.

“The conclusion we come to is that we see these spots in the sky with 99.98% confidence,” Penrose says. The physics world has, however, remained largely skeptical of these results to date and there has been limited interest among cosmologists about even attempting to replicate Penrose’s analysis.

It is unlikely that we will ever be able to directly observe what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang, let alone the moments before. The opaque superheated plasma that existed in the early moments will likely forever obscure our view. But there are other potentially observable phenomena such as primordial gravitational waves, primordial black holes, right-handed neutrinos, that could provide us some clues about which of the theories about our universe are correct.

“As we develop new theories and new models of cosmology, those will give us other interesting predictions that can that we can look for,” says Mack. “The hope is not necessarily that we're going to see the beginning more directly, but that maybe through some roundabout way we'll better understand the structure of physics itself.”

Until then, the story of our universe, its beginnings and whether it has an end, will continue to be debated.

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Would George Orwell have had a smartphone?

Would George Orwell have had a smartphone?

On the 70th anniversary of his death, we explore George Orwell’s book, 1984, and ask whether he’d have a smartphone if he were alive now.

 

THE EX ROYALS IN CANADA 

LOTS OF FOLKS IN CANADA HAVE BEEN SPECULATING ON WHERE THE EX ROYALS WILL LIVE, WELL OF COURSE THERE IS ONLY ONE PROVINCE BRITISH ENOUGH

Prince Harry landed in Vancouver on Tuesday morning before travelling to Victoria International Airport on Vancouver Island.

AND ONLY ONE CITY BRITISH EXPAT ENOUGH 

The duchess has been staying on Canada's west coast with her son, after briefly returning to the UK earlier this month following an extended six-week Christmas break on Vancouver Island with Prince Harry. 

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